Tag Archives: Michael Curtis Johnson

All of these films first screened theatrically in Chicago in the first half of 2018. I’ve linked to my original reviews and podcast appearances where applicable and offer new thoughts on a few films I haven’t written about elsewhere. Enjoy.

Three astonishing debut shorts by young female directors, all of which received their Chicago premieres at local festivals (Women of the Now’s Anniversary Showcase, the Chicago Underground Film Festival and the Chicago Critics Film Festival, respectively). The future – of cinema, of everything – is female. I wrote capsule reviews of all three for Time Out Chicago: Atoms of Asheshere, Dancerhere and Runnerhere.

19. The Art of Sitting Quietly and Doing Nothing (Alonzo, USA)

I enjoyed this no-budget absurdist/minimalist comedy so much that I wrote about it twice (for Time Out Chicago here and Cine-File here) then moderated a post-screening Q&A with the cast and crew following the World Premiere at the Nightingale Cinema.

18. A Fantastic Woman (Lelio, Chile)

Not as rich as Sebastian Lelio’s previous film, the sublime character study Gloria, this is nonetheless well worth seeing for Daniela Vega’s fantastic lead performance.

17. Annihilation (Garland, USA)

Oscar Isaac is miscast but thinking-person’s sci-fi done large is always welcome and, for my money, this is a clear advance on Ex Machina for director Alex Garland.

16. Satan’s Slaves (Anwar, Indonesia)

I’m grateful that Cinepocalypse brought this Indonesian horror film to the Music Box. It’s superior to Hereditary if only because the “Satanic” elements seem deeply rooted in the culture and religion of the characters and not just shoehorned in because the director is a fan of Rosemary’s Baby.

15. Future Language: The Dimensions of Von LMO(Felker, USA)

Not just a music doc but also an impressive experimental movie crossed with a highly personal essay film. My capsule review at Time Out Chicago here.

14. Have You Seen My Movie? (Smith, UK)

A clever and stimulating found-footage doc comprised of clips from other movies . . . in which people are watching movies. I discussed this on the inaugural episode of Cine-Cast, the Cine-File podcast, here.

13. Ismael’s Ghosts (Desplechin, France)

This is Arnaud Desplechin’s worst film but it features Marion Cotillard dancing to the original Another Side of Bob Dylan version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” which elevates it to the status of essential viewing.

12. Savage Youth (Johnson, USA)

Fascinating true-crime tale acted to perfection by a terrific young ensemble cast. I reviewed it for Time Out Chicago here and interviewed director Michael Curtis Johnson for Cine-File here.

11. The Green Fog (Maddin/Johnson/Johnson, USA)

A hilarious and ingenious “remake” of Vertigo, which consists only of scenes from other movies and T.V. shows shot in San Francisco — though this won’t make a lick of sense if you don’t know Hitchcock’s masterpiece like the back of your hand.

No American film this year feels more relevant than Robert Greene’s innovative doc about the U.S. government’s shameful deportation of recently unionized workers, many of them immigrants, from the title Arizona town 100 years ago. Capsule review at Time Out Chicago here.

8. Claire’s Camera (Hong, S. Korea/France)

This was dismissed or damned with faint praise as lightweight Hong in some quarters but those critics are dead wrong. I wrote a capsule review of this great comedy for Time Out Chicago here.

7. First Reformed (Schrader, USA)

I wrote on social media that I greatly enjoyed Paul Schrader’s “Protestant version of Diary of a Country Priest.” When asked by a friend to elaborate, I expounded: “Bresson has always been Schrader’s biggest influence and that influence is more pronounced in First Reformed than ever before. Some of the elements that can be traced back to Diary of a Country Priest specifically: the clergyman coming into conflict with his superiors for leading too ascetic a lifestyle, the way he bares his soul in his diary, his stomach cancer, his alcoholism, his search for grace in a superficial, material world, the austerity of the visual style, the transcendental uplift of the final scene, etc.”

6. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc(Dumont, France)

Bruno Dumont’s batshit-crazy electronic/metal musical about the childhood of Joan of Arc. I reviewed this for Cine-File here and discussed it on the inaugural episode of Cine-Cast, the Cine-File podcast, here.

5. The Woman Who Left (Diaz, Philippines)

A companion piece to Lav Diaz’s earlier Norte: The End of History, this nearly 4-hour epic — about a woman being released from prison after 30 years and searching for the man who framed her — has more intelligent things to say about “revenge” than all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies put together. Gorgeously shot in black-and-white and featuring a tremendous lead performance by Charo Santos-Concio (who came out of retirement to play the part).

4. Madeline’s Madeline (Decker, USA)

A theater director asks a teenage actress to mine deeply personal emotional terrain – including the tumultuous relationship she has with her own mother – in order to workshop a new play. This wild and beautiful film, a quantum leap beyond Josephine Decker’s first two movies, cuts deep into the heart of the dubious emotional exploitation inherent in all director/actor relationships. Imagine Mulholland Drive from a truly female perspective and you’ll have some idea of what Decker is up to — but this exhilarating film looks and sounds like nothing else. Helena Howard should go down as a cinematic immortal for this even if she never acts in another film.

3. Phantom Thread (Anderson, USA/UK)

PTA’s most perfect (though not greatest) film. I loved it as much as everyone and reviewed it for this very blog when it belatedly opened in Chicago in January. Capsule here.

2. 24 Frames(Kiarostami, Iran)

Abbas Kiarostami’s final film — and final masterpiece — contains the most innovative use of CGI I’ve ever seen. Capsule review at Time Out Chicago here.

1. Zama(Martel, Argentina)

Lucrecia Martel’s long-awaited return confronts colonialism and racism in 18th-century Argentina in a most daring and original way: by focusing on an entirely unexceptional man. It is also so radical and masterful in its approach to image and sound that it turns viewers into aliens (to paraphrase something Martel said to me in an interview, which you can read at Time Out Chicago here).

I conducted an interview with Savage Youth director Mike Johnson for Cine-File Chicago. It appeared on theCine-File blogtoday and I’m reproducing it in its entirety below.

Michael Glover Smith: SAVAGE YOUTH is based on the true story of a crime that occurred in your hometown of Joliet. How did you conduct your research and to what extent did you feel a moral obligation to tell the story authentically?

Michael Curtis Johnson: I attended funerals of the victims and the trials of the convicted. I did an exhaustive amount of creative research, but a journalistic approach didn’t really appeal to me. I didn’t reach out to anyone directly involved. I was more interested in how they portrayed themselves through social media and how they were perceived by the public to see if we could find something real beneath their social personas. I wanted to explore how we all play characters in our own lives. It was important for us to tell the story morally, but I don’t think that means staying completely true to the events as they unfolded. I didn’t want the victims or the convicted to be defined by a single day in their lives. That’s not fair, even if it’s factual. SAVAGE YOUTH isn’t a docudrama; it’s a melodrama. I thought about the work of S.E. Hinton a lot while developing it. No one would argue that her work is realism, but it feels true to me. Like Hinton, I believe youth can be savage, but it can also have moments of tenderness and grace.

MGS: You shot SAVAGE YOUTH before the last Presidential election although it wasn’t released until after Trump took office. The film deals with race and class divisions in a way that makes it feel like a commentary on Trump’s America. Have you thought about how the film would’ve resonated differently had the election gone the other way?

MCJ: The most redeemable true crime stories to me aren’t about politics, they’re about people. They might seem seedy and unsavory, but they can tell you so much about the human experience. I certainly didn’t want to make an overt political statement. Of course we were exploring certain themes, but we were doing it through character. Having said that, I know the way I view the film now is different than when we were making it. I spent the first half of my life in the Rust Belt and the second half in Los Angeles. When I’d leave my coastal utopia to come home, I felt a palpable tension. I always knew I wanted to make a film about that feeling. I actually tried to make a film exploring similar themes with the same title back in 2010 that never came to fruition. I also didn’t know how worn out the word “savage” would be now back then. While there’s no direct correlation whatsoever, the actual crime that inspired the film was committed just days before Obama was sworn in for his second term and the hope honeymoon was over. At the time, I felt something festering that really informed my approach, but I didn’t intellectually, or even consciously, understand it. I was in Poland of all places the month before Trump was elected screening a rough cut of SAVAGE YOUTH when someone asked me what I thought might happen if Trump won the election. I completely dismissed the idea of Trump ever winning. Even after shooting the film, I still hadn’t looked at it through a political lens. I’m still in a bubble in some ways. I still see the characters in our film as real kids and not concepts.

MGS: One of the most impressive aspects of the film is how all of the characters are equally sympathetic even when they’re at odds with each other or behaving in reprehensible ways. Was it important for you that viewers connect with all of the characters and was that a difficult balancing act to pull off?

MCJ:I don’t like bad guys vs. good guys. Heroes and villains are creatures of plot and I’m more a fan of story. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m always telling stories that have been told before and showing character archetypes that we’re familiar with, but I don’t label any character and usually let the characters guide me as opposed to directing them towards specific plot points. I feel like when you do that you don’t have to choose sides and the audience doesn’t need to pick a tribe either. I just aim for empathy.

MGS: The lead actors are all phenomenal. The chemistry between them is crucial in a story like this where deep friendships and romance are being depicted. What was the process of auditioning and rehearsing with these actors like?

MCJ: One of our producers (Charlene Lee) was also one of our casting directors. She found actors that were not only talented, but were brave enough to sign on for difficult material. We didn’t have any rehearsals. Everyone in the film is playing a role. None of them are just playing themselves. They’re young, but they’re pros. The acting process is a complete mystery to me. I like to watch performances unfold and react. The actors made the chemistry themselves. Grace (Victoria Cox) had this way of adapting her performance for whoever she was working with that really mirrored the empathetic but impressionable character she plays on screen. Before we got on set, I saw Tequan Richmond as this classic Cary Grant sort of actor and Will Brittain as a Marlon Brando method-type. But when they got into the scenes together, they’d adjust to each other and collaborate. They’d dance. Their respective processes were invisible. Mitchell Edwards has such a stoic star presence about him but can still portray such warmth. Sasha Feldman, Chloe Levine and J. Michael Trautmann are possessed. I don’t know how the characters they create come out of them. Performance is magic and I don’t want to see behind the curtain. My other producing partner (Michael Peluso) made it a priority (even more than I did) to shoot SAVAGE YOUTH in Joliet. In the end, being there had an alchemic effect on the cast that I never could have imagined.

MGS: I loved the way you used the audio of Walt Whitman reading his own poetry over the beginning and end of the film. What was the logic behind that decision?

MCJ:No logic. It wasn’t conceived until the editing process. Originally the sequences were written as character voice-overs. We could never get the voice-overs to work. The characters just seemed too self-aware to me. I wish I could have pulled off that David Gordon Green GEORGE WASHINGTON or Terrance Malick BADLANDS thing but I’m not that good. I don’t know if I’d call Whitman hip hop, but there is something that’s so visceral about his words that you don’t even need to understand them to feel what he’s saying. We tried to do that with some of the rap sequences and some of the more theatrical dialogue passages. The characters might as well be rapping in tongues, but I hope the audience still feels for them.

Michael Curtis Johnson will be present for a Q&A following the Chicago Premiere of SAVAGE YOUTH at the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Saturday, June 9th at 8:45pm at the Logan Theater. Ticket info here.

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The following piece on my best bets for this year’s Chicago Underground Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through this Sunday, was posted at Time Out Chicago today.

The Chicago Underground Film Festival reaches a significant milestone with this year’s 25th-anniversary edition, which runs from Wednesday, June 6 through Sunday, June 10. CUFF’s notion of what constitutes an “underground” film has always been admirably expansive and this year’s program is typically eclectic in its offering of narrative, documentary and experimental works. We picked one movie to see from each category.

Savage Youth is a fact-based crime drama set in Joliet that features half-a-dozen phenomenal performances by a cast of young adult actors. Will Brittain (Everybody Wants Some!!!) and Grace Victoria Cox (Twin Peaks) stand out as a budding horror-core rapper and a visual artist, respectively, whose lives veer inexorably into tragedy after they begin dabbling in drugs and petty crime. The film’s depiction of an economically depressed and racially divided small town milieu looks especially trenchant and disturbing in light of the current political climate (although it was shot before the 2016 election), but writer and director Michael Curtis Johnson allows his characters moments of tenderness worthy of early Nicholas Ray.

Lori Felker’s Future Language: The Dimensions of Von LMO is a fascinating documentary about an eccentric subject: a cult figure and pioneer of the No Wave music scene in New York City in the late 1970s who claims to be a “hybrid alien” from the “planet Strazar.” Felker’s film, eight years in the making, is an impressive work of both archaeology and craftsmanship that uses every stylistic trick in the book—from archival footage to animation—to chronicle Von LMO’s many rises and falls; but the director’s masterstroke was allowing the true subject of the movie to become her complicated friendship with this weirdo. Future Language is as much a thorny love letter from one eccentric artist to another as it is a warts-and-all portrait of a gifted musician haunted by demons of his own making.

DANCER is a wordless 8-minute experimental short that repurposes footage from Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 to exhilarating effect, taking a well-known scene of Christina Ricci tap dancing and “making it strange” by chopping it up, adding split screen and heavily distorting it all with a video synthesizer so that the fragmented and fuzzy images that result become a treatise on female beauty as well as the objectification of said beauty. Director Haley McCormick’s analog-painterly aesthetic is perfectly complemented by a gorgeous original score composed and performed by Heart of Palm (a side project of No Coast / No Hope operator Shea Hardacre).

For more information on the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival, including ticket info and showtimes, visit theCUFF website.